Samsung’s First Enterprise Tablet Has A Bizarre Rugged, Water-Resistant Design

Samsung's first enterprise
tablet is more useful for outdoor activities.YouTube

Samsung has made the Galaxy Tab Active, its first tablet
specifically built for business, available for preorder in the US
this week.

The Galaxy Tab Active has
pretty decent enterprise features, including an 8-inch screen and
16GB of memory. It’s also certified by SAP and Citrix, and comes
with Samsung’s KNOX enterprise security solution.

But what makes this device a
little confusing is its rugged, chunky design. It comes with a
protective case, and has water-resistant and anti-shock
protection features, which make it probably more suitable for
outdoor activities — not the conventional business use cases.
Samsung even stresses this point
on its product page, saying, “It is especially effective for
use in rough workplaces that involve proximate outdoor
use.”

The confusion doesn’t stop
there. In its
press release, Samsung says it came up with this design after
conducting a “series of advisory group workshops” with Fortune
500 companies to learn what “business leaders wanted from a
mobile device.” The meetings included companies from 12 different
industries, including retail, logistics, and transportation
businesses, Samsung says.

If anything, our guess is
Samsung wants to first target industries that require a lot of
outdoor activity, like construction and shipping, of which
Samsung owns a huge market share globally. But it’s still a
counterintuitive move when you consider Samsung wants to go after
Apple and IBM in the enterprise sector.

In fact, Samsung launched a new
enterprise service called
“Samsung 360 Services for Business” earlier this week, a day
after announcing a
disastrous Q3 guidance. It’s a new service aimed at all
enterprise users who need technical and security support, but it
almost looked like a rushed plan to counter Apple’s partnership
with IBM.

We’ve reached out to Samsung
for clarification and will update this article once we hear
back.